Keen On

The big news in Silicon Valley this week of a supposedly orchestrated “Panic Campaign” against AI. According to the researcher Nirit Weiss-Blatt, the campaign about the apocalyptical inevitability of AI is being driven by doomers like former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever. Weiss-Blatt’s analysis are now being taken seriously in a Silicon Valley not adverse to conspiracy theories - particularly against itself. But how credibly should outsiders take her warnings? Keith Teare takes it seriously enough to dedicate his That Was The Week newsletter to it. I’m not so sure. And in the midst of our jousting, we were joined by Weiss-Blatt herself whose analysis of this moral panic, I have to admit, isn’t entirely absurd. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

“Predictions are hard,” Yogi Berra once quipped, “especially about the future”. Yes they are. But in today’s AI boom/bubble, how exactly can we predict the future? According to Silicon Valley venture capitalist Aman Verjee, access to the future lies in the past. In his new book, A Brief History of Financial Bubbles, Verjee looks at history - particularly the 17th century Dutch tulip mania and the railway mania of 19th century England - to make sense of today’s tech economics. So what does history teach us about the current AI exuberance: boom or bubble? The Stanford and Harvard-educated Verjee, a member of the PayPal Mafia who wrote the company’s first business plan with Peter Thiel, and who now runs his own venture fund, brings both historical perspective and insider experience to this multi-trillion-dollar question. Today’s market is overheated, the VC warns, but it’s more nuanced than 1999. The MAG-7 companies are genuinely profitable, unlike the dotcom darlings. Nvidia isn’t Cisco. Yet “lazy circularity

America is not only a good country, but it can also make the world a better place. That’s the somewhat surprising conclusion of the progressive Washington Post columnist Shadi Hamid, whose new book, The Case for American Power, argues that America remains the one great power that can improve the world. Hamid, once a militant anti-Iraq War campus activist, has undergone a striking ideological journey in the quarter-century since 9/11. The moral arc of his life now bends towards a practical, imperfect morality. This son of Egyptian immigrants champions American dominance over Chinese and Russian dictatorships—while insisting that hypocrisy, far from being a fatal flaw, is actually the homage that vice pays to virtue. The gap between American ideals and reality, he argues, is where moral progress happens. He even has a word for this: asymptote. Meaning that American idealism, while it can never fully be reached, is still of great value. 1. The Left Has Lost Faith in America—And the Numbers Prove ItIn the early 2

We’ve done shows before on how contemporary America resembles late-stage Soviet society. But none quite as intriguing as with the Russian-born, US-based journalist Mikhail Zygar. In The Dark Side of the Earth, his new history of the Soviet Union’s demise, Zygar underlines the moral exhaustion of its citizens. People no longer believed in anything, he reports on the collapse of this vast Euro-Asian empire. And that’s the analogy Zygar makes with contemporary America which, he suggests, is equally exhausted. From the Soviet Union to the United States, a descent into a morally bankrupt nihilism defines the end of empire. Zygar even identifies the idealistic Obama with Gorbachev and the pugnacious Trump with Yeltsin, implying that a self-styled Putin-like “savior” lurks in the dark shadow of the American future. 1. Putin’s Russia is worse than the Soviet Union The Soviet Union had dozens of political prisoners in the 1970s; Putin’s Russia has thousands. Putin threatens the West with nuclear weapons far more aggre

The world is a remake. Yesterday’s show featured the MAGA remake of The Handmaid’s Tale. Today it’s Dr Strangelove 2.0 and the remaking of the trillion-dollar military-industrial complex in Silicon Valley. As William Hartung, co-author of The Trillion Dollar War Machine, notes, Dwight Eisenhower’s old military-industrial complex has migrated west to Silicon Valley. It even has a Strangelovian anti-hero: mad Peter Thiel, co-founder of Palantir and the Curtis Le May character behind other Silicon Valley military start-ups. No wonder current American foreign policy—with its Monroe Doctrine meddling in Latin America—also appear to be a giant remake.1. Silicon Valley Has Become the New Military-Industrial Complex Dwight Eisenhower’s old guard defense contractors—Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman—are being displaced by tech companies like Palantir, Anduril, and SpaceX. The “military-industrial-digital complex” represents a fundamental shift in how America builds and profits from its defense apparatus.2. T

Back in 2021, Margaret Atwood came on the show to give her dark take on the American future. Four years later, Atwood’s prescience, particularly in her 1985 classic The Handmaid’s Tale, is increasingly self-evident. As the journalist Irin Carmon notes, MAGA America has become an Atwoodian dystopia of trad wives and state fecundity. But it is also, Carmon warns in her new book Unbearable, a place that actively discriminates against pregnant women, especially those of color. American women are dying in childbirth at three times the rate of their peers in other wealthy nations. Even in liberal New York City, Black women are nine to twelve times likelier to die than white women. So MAGA America is simultaneously fetishizing and punishing fecundity—celebrating “Trump babies” while jailing pregnant women who test positive for drugs. Forget the trad wives. The problem lies with the trad men making pregnancy so unbearable in America today.1. America’s Maternal Mortality Crisis Is a National Disgrace American women d

How to fix today’s epidemic of loneliness? For the New Yorker cartoonist and author Sophie Lucido Johnson, the answer involves both pigeons and polyamory. As she argues in her brand new book, Kin: The Future of Family, Johnson provides the tools to forge kinship in everything from asking for help on a grocery run, to choosing to have roommates later in life to combat loneliness, to living in modern day “mommunes” of single mothers sharing bills and responsibilities. And the pigeons and polyamory? Johnson draws on pigeon behavior—how pair-bonded birds navigate home more successfully than solitary ones—as a metaphor for human interdependence. Her own polyamorous life, detailed in her popular 2018 memoir Many Love, exemplifies her broader argument: that intentional, non-traditional relationship structures can provide a much richer web of connectivity than the isolated nuclear family. So the future of family goes way beyond traditional family. It’s pigeons, polyamory and mommunes. * The nuclear family is historic

Lawyers usually like the law. The more the better. But in addition to his life as a top corporate lawyer, Philip K. Howard has made a second career out of criticizing the invasion of law into American society. In books like The Death of Common Sense, Life Without Lawyers and his latest, Saving Can-Do, Howard argues that a uncontrolled thicket of legal red tape is undermining innovation in America. The lawyer’s central thesis is against the law: America has morphed from a can-do nation into a can’t-do society where individual judgment has been replaced by legal central planning, and where citizens must ask lawyers for permission before acting. Too many lawyers and too many laws, Howard says, are transforming America into a dystopia caught between Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four. But isn’t that a bit rich, perhaps even Orwellian, from the Senior Counsel at one of America’s most illustrious law firms?Keen On America is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider be

My neologism-du-jour is “enstatification”. It’s what is happening in MAGA America with Trump’s Gaucho-style swaggering into the economy and his reversal to autarky and a back-to-the-future Monroe Doctrine. With the growth of a 19th-century style state power, America is trying to become the new China. Meanwhile, as Keith Teare notes in his latest That Was The Week newsletter, China is the new America in its embrace of technological innovation, particularly its trebling down on clean energy. That’s why the “Too Big To Fail” debate about OpenAI is so heavily laced in irony. It’s not just Sam Altman’s chutzpah in trying to simultaneously become the punter and the house in his multi-trillion-dollar bet on ChatGPT. But it might actually reflect the new realities of second-quarter 21st-century America. We’ve been wondering for a while now what comes after neo-liberalism. In a neologism: enstatification. * China Has Already Won the Clean Energy Race—And That Changes Everything Keith Teare confirms what The Economist

One big story captures all six books selected by the Financial Times for their short list of best business books of 2025. As the FT’s Senior Business Writer, Andrew Hill, notes, it’s the story of the shift in global economic power from the United States to China. It’s game over. From Dan Wang’s Breakneck, which contrasts China’s “engineering state” with America’s “lawyering nation,” to Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s Abundance, chronicling America’s inability to build infrastructure, the shortlist reads like an autopsy of American decline. Edward Fishman’s Choke Points examines the new age of economic warfare, while Eva Dou’s House of Huawei reveals how Chinese companies vaulted past Western competitors. Even Stephen Witt’s The Thinking Machine, ostensibly about NVIDIA’s triumph, ultimately focuses on the US-China technology race. The judges, Hill admits, “very clearly narrowed in on this highly consequential US-China theme.” Whether chronicling rare earth minerals, clean energy dominance, or regulatory scler

We all have our roles. I’m the smug San Francisco intellectual and the Orlando-based Dr Chloe Carmichael is the fearlessly authentic psychologist. She’s also the author of Can I Say That?, a feisty defense of free speech in our time of cancellation and unfriending. Most of us are too scared to say what we think, Carmichael argues about this anxiety-ridden, intolerant age. Such self-censorship is damaging our mental health, she worries. Liberals are more likely to defriend people over political differences. And yes, women sometimes lie. Imagine that. I’m a touch skeptical about some of this psychologizing—particularly whether any Americans are truly being silenced. But the good Dr Chloe has the “data” (who doesn’t?), the slot on Fox, and the cheek to nail me as a smug San Francisco intellectual. Even if such straight talk nearly got her unfriended by an anonymous woke reviewer at Publishers Weekly. Probably another smug coastal elite. Can I say that?1. The Mental Health Case for Free Speech Dr. Carmichael arg

A week is a long time in American politics. I did this interview with Alex Zakaras last week, before the midterms and Trump’s slide in the polls. But in spite of Mamdani’s victory earlier this week, the left still needs to figure out how to successfully reinvent itself in the MAGA age. That, at least, is the argument that Zakaras, a progressive political philosopher, makes in his new book Freedom For All. What could a liberal society be in 21st-century America, he asks. Zakaras’ answer is an unambiguous left populism that defiantly reclaims freedom from libertarian conservatives, challenges economic elites head-on, and stops defending the pre-Trump status quo. But can progressives really build the broad coalition necessary to win power while staying true to their principles? Yes, Alex Zakaras trumpets. By pursuing freedom for all in a post-neo-liberal America. 1. The Left Can’t Just Play Defense Zakaras argues that liberals have adopted a defensive posture—protecting institutions, defending the pre-Trump stat

If money is supposed to make you happy, then why do tech billionaires like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen seem so miserably angry? That’s the question at the heart of Jacob Silverman’s new book, Gilded Rage, an expose of Silicon Valley’s angry plutocracy. The weird thing is that a lot of these billionaires behave little differently from the apoplectic lumpen commentariat on X or Reddit. Sure, they might own X, but they share all the right-wing conspiracy theories infecting the online mob - from trollish racism and anti-semitism to a bro style paranoia about female power. According to Silverman, their rage is a form of exhaustion with the world itself. These men don’t just want to own everything—they want to exit society entirely, by inventing new cities, buying private islands, and founding Martian colonies. Unlike the Gilded Age robber barons who happily built universities and libraries, today’s miserable tech elites sit in their palatial basements and rage against society. Maybe we should take

Bell Curve author joins the intellectual mob (Peter Thiel, Jordan Peterson, Ross Douthat et al) and finds GodCharles Murray, the infamous co-author of the Bell Curve, has joined the crowd and is Taking Religion Seriously. But what if God doesn’t take him seriously—or worse, finds his work on cognitive elites sufficiently annoying to sentence him to give powerpoint presentations on IQ for eternity? Murray doesn’t seem too stressed by these Dantesque scenarios. Instead, he’s eager to keep up with his Quaker wife, Catherine Bly Cox, who has taken religion far more seriously than Murray himself. Even Murray’s discovery of God feels slightly detached and skeptical—as if the social scientist is laughing at himself for doing such an unverifiable and perhaps even low IQ thing. So if Murray can’t take his own faith seriously, why should God—or fellow skeptics of today’s mob fashion for religion—take him any more seriously? 1. The Intellectual Zeitgeist Has Shifted on Religion Twenty years ago, the New Atheists (Dawkin

Lea Ypi’s new book about her Greek-Albanian grandmother is a philosophical meditation on dignity, a history of Ottoman collapse and Balkan nationalism, and a warning about our own indignant age of manufactured identities and resurgent tribalism.Back in January 2022, Lea Ypi came on the show to discuss Free, her brilliant account of growing up in communist Albania. Now Ypi, who teaches political philosophy at LSE, is back with her follow-up, Indignity, an equally compelling biography of Leman Ypi, her maternal grandmother. “A Life Reimagined” is its subtitle, but it’s not just her grandmother whose life Ypi is reimagining. The book is a retelling of the modern stories of Greece, Turkey and Albania as well as a sly backwards glance on the court politics of the late Ottomans. Indignity is a Balkan story, in the grand tradition of Rebecca West. And like West, Ypi shows us that Balkan history is never quite dead - instead, it’s prophecy for our own age of resurgent nationalism and manufactured identities. Things d

A former US ambassador to Russia warns of America’s slide into autocracyAs American ambassador in Moscow between 2012 and 2014, Michael McFaul had a front row seat on Russia’s slide into autocracy. But in his new book, Autocrats vs Democrats, McFaul warns that it’s not just Putin, but also Xi and Trump who are fueling the “new global disorder”. And the intended audience for his jeremiad against autocracy is, of course, in the United States, rather than China or Russia. McFaul, who now teaches at Stanford, is warning about democracy’s dangerous flirtation with autocracy, especially in the United States. The parallels are chilling. Putin used the law to target enemies, reorganized property rights to silence independent media, and cultivated a patrimonial relationship with supporters who saw him as their protector. Trump, McFaul argues, is following a similar playbook—though America’s deeper democratic traditions and more autonomous institutions provide stronger resistance. Yet McFaul sees cause for alarm in Tru

A Nobel laureate on why we should sometimes trust scientists, and not politicians, to fix the futurePeter Agre won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2003, but he’s not interested in playing God. Or even know-it-all. “When Nobel Prize winners start predicting what the stock market would do, or who’s going to win the World Series, they may be beyond their specialty,” he says. Yet in his new book, Can Scientists Succeed Where Politicians Fail?, Agre claims that scientists have succeeded in defusing international crises where politicians have failed. He uses the 2015 Iran nuclear accord as an example, arguing that it only happened because two MIT-trained physicists spoke the same scientific language and brought presents for each other’s grandchildren. Then Trump canceled it. Now, with RFK Jr. running American health policy and the CDC “decimated,” he fears for catastrophe. Peter Agre may not quite be God. But he’s about as close as we will get in our polarized and paranoid world. * Science diplomacy works when pol

Why our panic about AI is nothing new—and why history suggests we have far more creative agency over our technological future than either Silicon Valley’s determinists or the neo-Luddites would have you believe.Who isn’t afraid of AI? But according to the San Francisco-based technology historian Vanessa Chang, that’s nothing new. So, she says, our ChatGPT age should give us hope rather than the reactionary hysteria marking much of today’s conversation about AI. In her new book, The Body Digital, Chang argues that our bodies have always been living interfaces between our minds and our world. Designing that interface has always been a choice, and so are the worlds that we are always building. From cuckoo clocks to player pianos to gramophones, every generation has panicked about machines colonizing human experience. And every generation has eventually found ways to shape those machines to human ends. So don’t be scared of ChatGPT, Chang says. Get creative. Get agency. * Tech anxiety is a historical constant, no

WHY LISTEN? Because Jeff Pearlman strips away the myth to reveal the real Tupac Shakur—a brilliant, wounded, and fiercely human artist whose story still speaks to America’s struggles with family, race, trauma, and truth.Happy Halloween, everyone. To celebrate, we’re turning our attention to one of white America’s most mythic—and most feared—figures: the hip-hop legend Tupac Shakur. In Only God Can Judge Me, his new Tupac biography, the Los Angeles-based sportswriter Jeff Pearlman reveals both the humanity and the heartbreak behind the myth. Yes, Pearlman concedes, Tupac Shakur was far from perfect. Yet in his music, his movies, and above all his short, turbulent life, Tupac embodied the quintessential American hero—a man who, despite all the injustice and chaos around him, stood up for what was right. Here was someone whom perhaps not even God could judge.1. Tupac’s story is fundamentally about trauma, not violencePearlman’s biggest revelation wasn’t about gang culture or rap feuds—it was about the crushing w

After almost two decades in limbo, Michael Pack’s once-rejected Iraq War film finds its moment — a reminder that even the most supposedly “patriotic” war stories reveal the tragic cost of battle.Seventeen years after PBS rejected his Iraq War documentary The Last 600 Meters as “too pro-military,” conservative filmmaker Michael Pack is finally seeing it air — fittingly, on Veterans Day weekend. Pack reflects on why he believes documentaries are the “second draft of history,” why every war film is, at its core, an anti-war film, and how America’s shifting attitudes toward the military say as much about our politics as our wars.1. History’s second draft.Pack sees documentaries as the “second draft of history,” a way to capture the ground truth before time erases memory — not to debate the causes or meanings of war, but to record what it actually felt like to fight.2. Too pro-military for 2008, perfect for 2025.PBS first rejected The Last 600 Meters as “too pro-military.” Seventeen years later, the network is ai